Why Music Moves Us

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Universal emotions like anger, sadness and happiness are
expressed nearly the same in both music and movement across
cultures, according to new research.

The researchers found that when Dartmouth undergraduates and
members of a remote Cambodian hill tribe were asked to use
sliding bars to adjust traits such as the speed, pitch, or
regularity of music, they used the same types of characteristics
to express
primal emotions. What's more, the same types of patterns were
used to express the same emotions in animations of movement in
both cultures.

"The kinds of dynamics you find in movement, you find also in
music and they're used in the same way to provide the same kind
of meaning," said study co-author Thalia Wheatley, a
neuroscientist at Dartmouth University.

The findings suggest music's intense power may lie in the fact it
is processed by ancient brain circuitry used to read emotion in
our movement.

"The study suggests why music is so fundamental and engaging for
us," said Jonathan Schooler, a professor of brain and
psychological sciences at the University of California at Santa
Barbara, who was not involved in the study. "It takes advantage
of some very, very basic and, in some sense, primitive systems
that understand how motion relates to emotion."

Past studies showed that the same brain areas were activated when
people read emotion in both music and movement. That made
Wheatley wonder how the two were connected.

To find out, Wheatley and her colleagues asked 50 Dartmouth
undergraduates to manipulate five slider bars to change
characteristics of an animated bouncy ball to make it look happy,
sad, angry, peaceful or scared.

To create different emotions in "Mr. Ball," the students could
use the slider bars to affect how often the ball bounced, how
often it made big bounces, whether it went up or down more often
and how smoothly it moved.

Another 50 students could use similar slider bars to adjust the
pitch trajectory, tempo, consonance (repetition), musical jumps
and jitteriness of music to capture those same emotions.

The students tended to put the slider bars in roughly the same
positions whether they were creating angry music or angry moving
balls.

To see if these trends held across cultures, Wheatley's team
traveled to the remote highlands of Cambodia and asked about 85
members of the
Kreung tribe to perform the same task. Kreung music sounds
radically different from Western music, with gongs and an
instrument called a mem that sounds a bit like an insect buzzing,
Wheatley said. None of the tribes' people had any exposure to
Western music or media, she added.

Interestingly, the Kreung tended to put the slider bars in
roughly the same positions as Americans did to capture different
emotions, and the position of the sliders was very similar for
both music and emotions.

The findings suggest that music taps into the brain networks and
regions that we use to understand emotion in people's movements.
That may explain why
music has such power to move us — it's activating deep-seated
brain regions that are used to process emotion, Wheatley said.

"Emotion is the same thing no matter whether it's coming in
through our eyes or ears," she said.

The study is detailed today (Dec. 17) in the journal Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences.